I’m really partial to books about data management. This might be because I am currently writing my fourth book relating to data management, but there are honestly lots of great data management books out there. There are actually so many books available that it can be hard to identify the best book to fit your needs.
Last year, my friend and collaborator Abigail Goben and I took on this issue by publishing an annotated bibliography of data management books for researchers. That article describes the 17 books that cover data management topics across a range of research disciplines.
Now, Abigail and I are back with an annotated bibliography of data management books for the librarian audience. There are 32 English-language books on this list, including several books that discuss library data services broadly. (Aside: I find it a bit frustrating that there are almost twice as many books for librarians than for researchers on this topic, but I guess that means less competition for my books, which are aimed at researchers.)
Our goal for the article was to provide information about what each book covers and which books we recommend in different areas. Given that there are so many books and the fact that most cost between $50 to $100, I don’t expect any of my peers to purchase all of them. So we’ve done an initial pass to help guide you. In particular, Abigail and I had a lot of fun writing the summaries of each book and then editing each other’s words.
A couple interesting things came out of the analysis of this pile of books. The first is that we (librarians) are publishing a lot of edited collections, which represent 20 of the 32 books (63%). I tend to find books written by a single or a few authors to be more useful than a book with different authors for every chapter – the exception is books on narrow topics, such as teaching data management, where multiple perspectives can be valuable. As we have so many books on data management/data services, I personally think that these broad edited collections have diminishing value to me as a reader (even though I admit to having written chapters in a couple of them).
The other interesting thing in our article is a topical analysis of all of the books (see Table 3 in the article). Certain topics were (unsurprisingly) covered frequently – data education, data management, data repositories, and curation – but I find the less frequently covered topics to be more interesting: data accessibility, high performance computing, community data (including Indigenous data and the CARE Principles), and creating a data catalog. Acquisition editors in particular should pay attention to this table and guide potential book authors to fill the gaps we have in the literature rather than publish yet another introduction-to-library-data-management book.
If you are a library worker doing data work, I hope you find this annotated bibliography to be useful. The article is open access (with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license), so feel free to use and reuse the information!
